‘But freedom,’ says my author, ‘unless it reaches farther than this, will not serve the turn; and it passes for a good plea that a man is not free at all, if he is not as free to will, as he is to act what he wills. Concerning a man’s liberty, there yet therefore is raised this farther question, whether a man be free to will? And as to that I imagine that a man in respect of willing, when any action in his power is once proposed to his thoughts as presently [that is, immediately] to be done, cannot be free. The reason whereof is very manifest; for it being unavoidable that the action depending on his will should exist or not exist, and its existence or non-existence following perfectly the determination of his will, he cannot avoid willing the existence or non-existence of that action; it is absolutely necessary that he will the one, or the other, _i.e._ prefer the one to the other, since one of them must necessarily follow.’—Page 246. This seems to be the weak part of Mr. Locke’s reasoning, and is the only place, as I remember, where he has considered the certainty of the event as inconsistent with the practical liberty for which he contends. At this rate, it must be given up altogether: there can be no such thing as liberty. For in all cases whatever, one determination must happen rather than another. In all cases whatever, we must choose either one way or another, or suspend our choice. Suspense and deliberation, as Helvetius and others have justly remarked, are in this sense equally necessary with precipitation of judgment. The actual or final event is in both cases the necessary consequence of preceding causes, but that does not destroy freedom of choice in either case, if the event depends upon the exercise of choice, whether the time allowed for the mind to choose in, be longer or shorter. If by liberty be meant the uncertainty of the event, then liberty is a nonentity: but if it be supposed to relate to the concurrence of certain powers of an agent in the production of that event, then it is as true and as real a thing as the necessity to which it is thus opposed, and which consists in the exclusion of certain powers possessed by an agent from operating in the producing of any event. At the same time it must be granted, that the power of deliberation is the most valuable privilege of our rational nature, and the great enlargement of the discursive faculty of the will. Mr. Locke seems only to have erred in mistaking a difference of degree or extent for one of kind. The practical truth of the distinction is undeniable. His words are:—